whoibrar

Unicode Character Look-Alikes

Original Letter	Look-Alike(s)
a	а ạ ą ä à á ą
c	с ƈ ċ
d	ԁ ɗ
e	е ẹ ė é è
g	ġ
h	һ

Hi, I'm mcpower. I've done Advent of Code seriously for two years now in Python, placing 9th in 2018 and 12th in 2017. This year, I'm taking a break from aiming for the leaderboard - while it's fun and all, it is a bit stressful at times (the good kind of stress, though!). As such, I'd like to share a few tips for anyone wanting to aim for the leaderboard.

This is everything that worked for me. Your mileage may vary, though - don't take this as gospel, see what works for you.

Go fast

Go fast.

58 bytes of CSS to look great nearly everywhere

When making this website, i wanted a simple, reasonable way to make it look good on most displays. Not counting any minimization techniques, the following 58 bytes worked well for me:

main {
  max-width: 38rem;
  padding: 2rem;
  margin: auto;
}

An introduction to alternative keyboard layouts

This is a post to satisfy your curiosity about alternative keyboard layouts, why some people use them, and whether they're for you. It is intended to discuss the topic in broad terms, but I will share my personal preferences towards the end. Due to time constraints and my own limited knowledge, I will focus on layouts optimized for the English language (ANSI variants, with an occasional nod to ISO).

First off, it's important to understand how much debate there is about how we got here: I will not even attempt to settle the issue of who invented the 'first' typewriter layout, because the modern device had many predecessors going back centuries. The usual legend of typewriter evolution holds that American Christopher Latham Sholes debuted the typewriter in 1868 with a 2-row layout that was (nearly) alphabetical. A horizontal stagger between the rows made room for the lever arms attached to each key:


 3 5 7 9 N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
2 4 6 8 . A B C D E

The 4 C's of good technical communication:

concise

Concision not only saves the audience time, it cuts out distracting verbiage and helps avoid burying key information in a sea of boiler plate.

Audiences very often revisit sources, and concision makes it easier to relocate particular bits of information.

Smaller pieces are easier to rearrange, and so in practice, the more concise, the more authors are likely to work out an ideal structure.

Click to toggle contents of `code`

CODE!

People

`:bowtie:`	😄 `:smile:`	😆 `:laughing:`
😊 `:blush:`	😃 `:smiley:`	☺️ `:relaxed:`
😏 `:smirk:`	😍 `:heart_eyes:`	😘 `:kissing_heart:`
😚 `:kissing_closed_eyes:`	😳 `:flushed:`	😌 `:relieved:`
😆 `:satisfied:`	😁 `:grin:`	😉 `:wink:`
😜 `:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:`	😝 `:stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:`	😀 `:grinning:`
😗 `:kissing:`	😙 `:kissing_smiling_eyes:`	😛 `:stuck_out_tongue:`

1. Highlighting the Jekyll way.

This method uses Liquid tags and works when published to Github Pages. It doesn't work in Github's viewer when browsing the repo.

{{ "{% highlight html linenos "}}%}
<div>this is some preformatted code</div>
{{ "{% endhighlight "}}%}

	const MY_DOMAIN = "agodrich.com"
	const START_PAGE = "https://www.notion.so/gatsby-starter-notion-2c5e3d685aa341088d4cd8daca52fcc2"
	const DISQUS_SHORTNAME = "agodrich"

	addEventListener('fetch', event => {
	event.respondWith(fetchAndApply(event.request))
	})

	const corsHeaders = {
	"Access-Control-Allow-Origin": "*",